MOTHERLINESS 75

and there. As he fumbled through the pages, Mrs. Besant
casually turned to him and said : t{ It is towards the bottom
of the third page ". It was surprising that she should have
followed the report so carefully and remembered even the
pages where different words appeared. I do not know if
any other President would be so careful.

Another word that has been disliked is ' vernacular' used
for Indian languages. Mrs. Besant herself used it and saw
no harm in it. My friend, Shivaprasad Gupta 3H, corres-
ponded with her on the subject, but she said it contained
no reproach to the provincial languages of India. Recent
Government circulars have, however, discouraged the use
of the word. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his Autobiography213, says
it means the language spoken by slaves213. Lord Morley
in his ' Recollections ' 214 seems to use it for a local county
dialect, a patois.

Another word I should like to see abolished is ' coolie "2l:>
for porters. I have come to dislike the word ever since
I heard the late Lord Balfour21fi (then Mr. Balfour) say in
the House of Commons that the English worker was not
a Chinese or Indian coolie ! That showed the word did not
indicate an honest profession but was actually one of contempt.

Thinking of the Central Hindu College Boarding House
of those days, let me record a mischievous prank of the boys.
Mrs. Besant used to speak of spirits or disembodied beings.
The boys hung bunches of keys from various windows
on the upper floor and tied strings to them. At nights
they used to pull the strings and then the keys would jingle
all over the place. The boys would draw long faces and
tell the authorities that there were perhaps spirits about the